Enriching the documentation

[someparsa]

Hi Ritchie, I believe that the documentation of the anaStruct do not reflect the capabilities of the package. Therefore, I forked the latest version and I will gradually modify the documentation in my free time. I will add examples, may be easy and hard, linking to other packages, and some practical examples.

I may not be very fast at this, but the result will help your project I think. If you would like, please have a look some time and merge them with your main repo.

[michaellisitsa]

This is great! I've been working through creating my first structure in anastruct, and something I'd really love to see is filling out some examples of common use cases. For example, case of point loads in the center of an element. See my attempt at explaining this here #92

Also would love to clarify the distinction between node and mesh (argument when you first set up the calculation) and its impact on all the outputted results. 'mesh' is defined in the api reference as only affecting plotting, however, from the perspective of an user interested in results at intermediate locations along a beam some extra hand-holding as to how to use this would be really great. e.g. I tried to get deflections at a particular location along the beam, and noticed that ss.element_map[elementId].deflection will only have as many results as the mesh is long.

[someparsa]

Nice to read this, Michael. Thanks. Yes exactly. I believe that for such engineering packages like anaStruct, it is the examples that helps the package penetrate into industry. The more successful we are in introducing the features, the more engineers use it in their projects. I hope we will be successful in this.

[smith120bh]

Hi @someparsa :

Thank you so much for helping with documentation! Ritchie has largely stepped back from maintaining the anastruct package, and I've generally taken over at this point. At least for now, however, I am only a "maintainer", not an "administrator" of the repo, so I don't have full rights to promote you as a maintainer yet.

However, like most open-source repositories, this one does still allow anyone to create a pull request from their own fork. If you go to the "Pull Requests" tab above, then GitHub should automatically prompt you about creating a pull request from your fork, if you've recently committed into it - but you can also manually do so by clicking "New Pull Request" -> "Compare across forks".

If you don't create a pull request, then I can pull your work in myself, but I'd rather GitHub give you the credit for work you do :-) Regardless, thank you!

[someparsa]

Hi Brooks. Many thanks for the catch up. Sure I will help you with the documentation. I am busy with another packages these days with the aim of improving my coding skills and getting more familiar with the GIT. I have a plan for the documentation of this package. I will shift on it in very near future. I don't need a specific access, not worries on that. I will fork the package and will update the documentation on it. Will update you soon. In the meanwhile I would be thankful if you could share with me the important examples and features you think you would like to be highlighted in the examples. I think it is better to make very small but numerous examples to make usage of the package easier for the end-user. The same as the examples we can see on the scikit-learn package for instance. Take care.

[someparsa]

I proposed a pull request based on my recent advances on the installation page. Comments on that page will ease my understanding of your preferences over the whole set of the documentation.

[someparsa]

As an update on the examples and documentation, I had an overview on the documentation. The way the functions are commented needs improvement. But the good point is that the number of functions are limited. For a very new comer to the python packages, like many structural engineers in workspace, I will make a cheat sheet to make understanding of the package easier. This will appear as a new page in the documentation. Improvement to the functions needs our discussion later.